How does social media affect your life?

How does social media affect your life?

From an anthropological perspective, how do you view the impact of social media on people's lives? Is it getting people to have greater freedom of making friends, or is it more anxious? Is it making friends more intimate or more alienated?

Why We Post?

People use social networks to communicate with the outside world, access information, and build and maintain a variety of interpersonal relationships. For the workers in the small town factory, what is the meaning of a smartphone, a QQ space, and a QQ group that is full of time? The lives of these workers are not only the geographical migration between their hometowns and the towns where the factories are located but also in line with global trends, moving from offline to online.

At this sharing session, Dr. Xinyuan was cut into the methodology of anthropological research. He first introduced the understanding and understanding of the global topic of “Social Impact of Social Media” from the perspective of anthropologists and their many frontiers. Theory, such as multi-media theory, controllable social theory, acquisition theory...

During the two-hour sharing process, Dr. Xinyuan also sent these results to face to face for us, not only stimulating the audience's strong interest in anthropology and social media related topics but also letting the sharing session The live broadcasters were thrilled, and everyone was very active by remotely interacting with the barrage and messages.

Sense of belonging in mobile life

- "It seems like someone is waiting for you there."

Moving from the field, the workers and neighbors of these workers have been changing, and the locals are almost unwilling to become friends with migrant workers. Men and women are rarely developed between locals and foreigners. Even primary schools will Divide into local classes and field classes, the obvious social segmentation makes these migrant workers lack a stable social environment, and does not have a sense of belonging to the environment, and QQ is a relatively stable dating environment and communication environment.

More importantly, they are subject to secular prejudice in the real world, but they can get more simple emotional belonging on QQ. A local driver and Xinyuan said: "On QQ, you are saying what you want to say. (Netizens) They like to listen and listen, don't like it doesn't matter. Often chatting on QQ is really enjoying you. This relationship is actually very pure, not to say that you like you because you have more money, or you like you when you are a big official. Whether you want money or whatever you want to be promoted and made a fortune, it is ordinary people, no interest, very pure. of."

A social network is an outside world

- "Seeing the world is the willingness to socialize."

Xin Yuan discovered that migrant worker who had left their hometowns rarely contacted relatives and friends in their hometowns. Most of the time they were active in the QQ group full of strangers. Xiao Chen, a chef who works in the town, told her: "Sometimes, I don't want to contact, I just have nothing to say when I contact. When I go back in the New Year, I don't have anything new to talk about, except for talking about my memories. Not quite the same, the topic is gone."

For many rural migrant workers, they came out to see the world, and the strange group on QQ is the so-called "outside world" they want to establish.

Depicting the upcoming life

- "The world outside the mobile phone is very difficult."

“People often say that they are bitter and sweet, and the Chinese have always had the idea of ?? living for the future.” What is future life like? Before the Internet became popular, the future was just an imagination in the mind, and the network seemed to turn this "invisible" into a tangible, and gradually "abstract" into a "figuration." This is especially true for people living in the lower middle of society. They seem to see their "future" through the Internet, and social networks are gradually becoming the means by which they build another life that is completely different from reality.

In the QQ space of many factory girls, Xinyuan saw such things as "romantic wedding", "castle palace", "beauty scenery"... Maybe you can't understand why they like to send these pictures. But after understanding their current situation and living conditions, they will find that these all show their desire for future life, for them, that is the upcoming life.

About anthropology -

"Marx said that "the essence of man is the sum of social relations. In fact, the essence of anthropology is to study people by studying human relations. It is as if we want to understand the meaning of a sentence only in the context of context to understand. What people say, how people do, people say they How is it done? The difference between the three is that anthropological research is trying to find out how people do it in nature."

About social networks -

The beautiful images of “social media bringing people closer to each other” is technically possible, but in fact, social networks are not simply pulling or sorting out social distances, it just puts people at the right distance. In order to put people at a controllable distance, it is possible to maintain interpersonal relationships at a low cost to form "controllable socialization."

About people and technology -

“There is a very wrong imagination: there is no intermediary between people before technology. In fact, people are people because there is a cultural connection between people and nature, people are wrapped in culture. Even when we meet face to face, we also have many invisible expectations. This kind of intermediary is like the air, and it is surrounded by us. There is no interpersonal relationship without intermediaries. Technology only changes the intermediary mode, but it does not change the interpersonal relationship. In our "acquisition theory", in the future, we will only get the missing parts of human nature from technology."